David Lawlor

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David Lawlor

Short Bio:

David Lawlor works in the publishing industry and lives in Wicklow, Ireland. He has written six novels. Tan is the first in a series of four set around the Irish War of Independence and Irish Civil War.

David is also the author of High Crimes, a modern thriller following the exploits of an obsessive stalker and his five unknowing victims.

Tan

A Story of Exile, Betrayal and Revenge

‘Peelers have a knack for hitting you where it hurts; broken nose, bruised ribs, a few loosened teeth…no more than a rapist deserved, Sergeant Coveney and District Inspector Webber had said. Proper order, too – except the lad was no rapist, and Webber knew it.’

It’s 1914 and Liam Mannion is forced into exile for a crime he didn’t commit. He flees Balbriggan, the only home he has ever known and travels to England, where he enlists and endures the torment of trench warfare in France. Five years later he’s back in England, a changed man, living in the shadow of his battlefield memories. Liam finds work in a Manchester cotton mill but prejudice and illness soon see him destitute. Starving and desperate, he enlists in a new military force heading to Ireland – the Black and Tans – and is posted to the very town he fled as a youth.

While he has been away Liam’s childhood friends have joined the republican cause, while his brother has allied himself to the Crown forces. Liam must wrestle with his own conflicted feelings about duty to the ruthless Tans and loyalty to his friends. The potent combination of ambition, patriotism and betrayal collide, forcing him to act as he comes face to face with the man who spread lies about him all those years before.

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Reviews

'A rollercoaster Sci-fi adventure that flings the reader headlong into other worlds that are all the more unnerving because they blend the fantastic with the familiar. You catch yourself thinking –somewhere in our past or our future this might actually be happening. A novel that awakens the young-adventurer in all of us.'

'William Long's Timecrack is a good old fashioned science fiction romp in the true spirit of the father of the genre, H.G. Wells. This dizzying Boy's-Own escapade through the wormholes of time and space will have you gripped right to the last with its fantastical vistas of new exotic worlds and ancient civilisations.'